I’ve mentioned before how uncrafty I am, particularly when it comes to drumming up artistic ideas for easy craft projects my kids can create. Yes, I know there’s a world of online resources for “Simple and Fun Craft Activities!” and whatnot, and to most of those websites I say “blecch,” “ppffft!” and whatever sound an eye roll makes. Because those sites are designed to be helpful, to take all the guesswork and brainstorming out of the craft time equation, but what they usually end up doing instead is making me feel even more inept. There is invariably some supply or ingredient I don’t have (or don’t even know where to find); the thing is hopelessly complicated for my 2-year-old (OK, for me too); or the craft is, let’s be honest, just plain stupid.
For whatever reason, the boys have seemed to pick up on my anti-art vibe. Perhaps my insecurity translates to indifference. Maybe I’m just not good at teaching small children to follow directions. Or it could be that they’re just 2- and 4-year-old boys who would rather wrestle than rip paper for a collage.

The thing is, they get excited at the thought of doing an art project. They love to put on their little aprons, and they love to color with markers (for approximately 90 seconds), and they extra-extra love to squeeze half a bottle of glue onto a piece of paper. But that’s where the train typically derails. Because dumping glue and “accidentally” coloring on the counter is all they really want to do, and the whole thing devolves into chaos pretty quickly … unless, that is, I say the magic words: “Let’s paint.”

They love to “paint.” And I say “paint” because I’m pretty sure what they do is not technically painting. For Evan, “painting” is smearing paint all over his hands and then asking me to wipe them off a thousand times. For Kostyn, it’s soaking his paintbrush in a huge blob of color and then putting it directly into his water cup to swish it around and make an even more interesting hue of brownish purple paint sludge, which is the closest he ever gets to a finished masterpiece. And I stand there overseeing the whole thing, wiping Evan’s hands and rinsing Kostyn’s sludge and fretting about all the paint being wasted.

Basically, art has been stressing me out. And not just in our own kitchen, either.

This summer I started taking them to a friend’s art camp, thinking it would be a perfect way for them to get that creative outlet at the hands of a trained professional instead of, well, me. While my friend is absolutely amazing at coming up with new project ideas and different materials for the kids to use, I’m kind of always embarrassed by the way the boys behave. The other kids (all 3-year-old girls) follow directions, stay in one spot, paint and share and giggle and create art. My boys run in and out of the room, squeeze their way through paint bottle after glue bottle, and create a total mess. The little girls drizzle glue onto paper and create three-dimensional collages; Evan squeezes an entire bottle of glue onto his paper and then rubs his hands in it. The little girls spray watered-down paint onto a sheet; my boys spray watered-down paint onto each other.

You get the idea. Even Organized Art = Stress.

All of this stress led up to yesterday afternoon, when we were invited to a neighbor’s house so the boys could help the other kids on our street color a sign to welcome home the new baby who was just born to the family that lives next-door. Every other kid around that dining room table was neatly coloring inside a bubble letter of a sign that spelled “WELCOME HOME CALEB!”  My kids parked themselves in front of the “W-E-L-C” and proceeded to destroy any recognition of those letters. By the time they were finished they’d used every color of marker in the bin and they’d worn a hole through the middle of the “W.”

I understood that at 2, Evan surely wasn’t expected to color inside the lines or anything, but I was annoyed at how Kostyn, at 4 years old, refused to even try. I coaxed, asked, quietly pleaded for him to “please stop drawing T’s and Y’s and H’s all over the paper you’re supposed to be coloring the letters,” to no avail.

At one point, as I watched the “E” disappearing completely beneath Kostyn’s swirls and random letters and circles, I said, “You’re making nice letters, Kostyn, but you’re making it hard to see the words on the sign.” And a little girl sitting across from him, neatly coloring the “B” in “CALEB,” paused from her project and looked up at me. “I don’t really think Caleb’s going to know the difference,” she said, so innocently, so sweetly, so intelligently.

And that’s when it hit me that this was one of those times when we parents think we’re leading but we’re really just standing in the way. I realized that I’ve been lamenting their lack of artistic ability when I should have been lauding their completely confident abundance of artistic expression. They are Painters. Musicians. Sculptors. Dancers. They are happy little creations who love to create.

So what if they’re covering up words I can already read on a banner. They’re creating their own letters!

I realized I should stop worrying about all the wasted paint and glue, and simply get out of their way. They are artists, after all. And artists need their space.

(And occasionally someone to wipe their hands.)